President Donald Trump said in an interview Tuesday that Iran was running out of crucial armaments and that he’d be open to working with some surviving members of the country’s ruling regime.
In a roughly four-minute phone call with POLITICO, which is, along with Business Insider, part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, Trump argued that Tehran’s military capacity is being steadily degraded, even as Iranian forces are expected to “keep lobbing missiles for a while.”
“They’re running out and they’re running out of areas to shoot them, because they’re being decimated,” Trump said. “They’re running out of launchers.”
The president’s assertion is new and had not been mentioned during a Monday Pentagon briefing or publicly by any other administration officials.
The president’s comments come as the US and the Middle East brace for continued missile and drone attacks from Iran, which has retaliated in waves since the conflict erupted early on Saturday.
US embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait announced Tuesday they would close and the State Department warned Americans across the Middle East to leave the region as the quickly expanding war entered its fourth day.
The president’s suggestion that Iran’s capacity to retaliate would soon subside comes as the timeline for hostilities, the US’s own stockpile, the ultimate goal of the war and the plan for who leads Iran remains up for debate, even, at times, within the administration.
Trump during the interview said, “we have unlimited of the middle- and upper middle- ammunition and things. We save it and we build it.”
“The defense companies are on a rapid tear to build the various things we need,” he added. “They’re under emergency orders. We’re making it fast. But we have unlimited, as stupid as [former President Joe] Biden was, he didn’t use it.”
But on Tuesday Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said there is a “potential desperate and disastrous shortage of THAAD and Patriot systems that are necessary to protect our embassies, our bases, our civilians.”
Trump has suggested the war could last four or five weeks or be over in a few more days.
He justified the war by saying Iran was on the verge of having a nuclear weapon or being capable of attacking the United States, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday that Israel was poised to strike Iran anyway — meaning America would have been hit in response.
Varying constituencies within the GOP spent the weekend promoting their preferred candidate to lead Iran, with little more than lip service paid to the idea of a Democratic election.
Trump, on Tuesday, said he’d be open to engaging with a reconfigured Iranian government if one emerges from the conflict.
Asked whether it is too late for him to consider working with someone in a new government, Trump replied, “Nope, not too late. Forty-nine [senior Iranian leaders] were killed, don’t forget, so that goes pretty deep, right? New ones are emerging. A lot of people want the job. Some of them would be very good.”
Sophia Cai is a White House reporter at POLITICO, which is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network. The network publishes major stories from the Axel Springer network of publications, a worldwide group of news outlets that includes Business Insider.
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